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【Brownbag】Land Use Distortion in a Spatial Economy


  • 研討會日期 : 2023-02-17
  • 時間 : 12:10
  • 主講人 : Professor Wen-Tai Hsu (許文泰)
  • 註冊 : Link
  • 地點 : Conference room B110
  • 演講者簡介 : Professor Wen-Tai Hsu received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities in 2008. He is currently a Research Fellow at the Institute of Economics, Academia Sinica. His research interests are Urban and Regional Economics and International Economics.
  • 演講摘要 : This paper quantitatively examines how the urban land allocation affects welfare in China. We build a general equilibrium model based on a mono-centric city structure to formulate the high price ratio between residential and industrial land as a joint outcome of urban structure and land use distortion in each city. This framework allows us to conduct the counterfactual analysis of land distribution and prices in the absence of government's intervention on urban land allocation across cities: the average land price ratio of residential to industrial use across 278 prefectures drops from 8.7 to 2.4 fold by using the data in 2014. Combining with the quantitative model with freely tradable homogeneous manufacturing good and the non-tradable service good, the new land distribution generated by the market will lead to the changes on wages, population, and good prices, and all these together bring about 5.39% welfare gain. When we incorporate the migration frictions, the welfare gain decreases to 3.4%, which implies that urban land allocation and migration frictions coordinate in the same direction of affecting spatial population distribution and thus decreasing welfare simultaneously.